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Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

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, Files

Some people share — or overshare — their lives on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Sophie Tweed-Simmons is used to sharing her growing pains on TV.

From the age of 11, she was part of the family on Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels, the KISS-and-tell reality series built around the lives of KISS bassist Gene Simmons and actress Shannon Tweed.

On Dec. 9, filming starts in B.C. and the U.S. on a new reality series featuring Tweed-Simmons, her mom and whoever and whatever life throws at them.

“Family Jewels was great but now my mom and I are on this journey of what I want to do with my life,” says Tweed-Simmons, now 21. “And right now it’s struggling with music and acting.”

Talking on the phone from Los Angeles just after auditioning for a Super Bowl commercial, Tweed-Simmons said she expects the show — which is being produced for the W Network by Vancouver’s Force Four Entertainment — will focus on her career, her charity work and her relationship with her mom.

“In the new show there are really no boundaries with me and my mom so you’ll hear everything about my love life, which wasn’t in Family Jewels,” Tweed-Simmons said. “We’re no strangers to sharing everything with the camera and that’s no exception in this show. My mom is in a different place in her life. Her kids are out of the house, she’s very much feeling empty nest and she’s wanting me to try acting, which is her profession and I think she takes control of my life sometimes, whether I like it or not, and definitely of my dating life, which I hate and I love.”

John Ritchie, executive producer for Force Four, said the show grew out of a meeting with Tweed, a proud Newfoundland native, last year at an international TV festival in Cannes.

“It will be a smart, funny take on a familiar mother daughter relationship set in the exciting world where Shannon and Sophie live and we hope it will be a big hit in Canada and around the world.”

The B.C. company — which produces other reality shows such as The Cupcake Girls — is a natural fit because Tweed-Simmons splits her time between Vancouver, Whistler, Los Angeles and most recently, Nashville, where she is working on her first album.

And no, the daughter of the KISS army leader is not singing country tunes.

“It’s kind of alternative pop,” Tweed-Simmons said. “It’s pop in the sense that everyone will like it but alternative in that there’s no synthesizer or rapping.”

But Canada is home and Whistler is where Tweed-Simmons hopes to settle some day.

“When I was sixteen or seventeen I worked at the Whistler Animal Shelter. When I got a little bit older I bartended at the Savage Beagle. I learned how to snowboard there, my best friends are there, it just became home. And when I go to L.A. I always feel homesick for it.”

“Starting when you’re 11 it’s like, ‘Oh, this is what we do on weekends. Got it.’ But I’m lucky we did that. It gave me a real comfort on camera that helps with my acting.”

Tweed-Simmons said living on screen also keeps life entertaining.

“We get a lot of opportunities that we wouldn’t usually get. People want us to go on trips or go skydiving and we’re all up for that but it also gave us great opportunities.”

The opportunity she’s most enthusiastic about discussing is the charity work she’s doing for Sophie’s Place, the B.C. child advocacy centre named for her. The project was the idea of Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts.

“She wanted a kid to be the face of it and at the time I had just turned 18 and I loved that idea,” says Tweed-Simmons.

“Kids come to us when they’ve been mentally, sexually, or physically abused, and instead of shuffling kids around to a police station, to a psychiatrist, and a doctor, everyone comes to us. So the kid is in a really friendly, safe place where they can tell their story and get all the treatment they need, the rehab they need.”

When the children in the centre have to testify in court, the centre helps them do so via video.

The centre, which Tweed-Simmons says works with about 2,000 children each year, is operated in collaboration with the Surrey RCMP, the Ministry of Children and Family Development, the City of Surrey, the Ministry of Justice’s victim services and crime prevention division, and The Centre for Child Development.

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